People will stop making it an RoI once it costs nothing in both time or money.

Seems a bit harsh. Playing video games has no particular ROI (unless you want to go into creative arguments), but they cost money and take up time. Fulfillment, joy, wisdom, those are valuable even if you can't exchange them for cash.

The issue is probably rather the insane costs of education in some countries. If I had to go into debt for a big chunk of my life to study, I'm not sure I would have done it without a clear path towards paying that off.

Video games are a poor ROI, young adults should minimize them and study or socialize (in person) instead. The opportunity cost is huge.

Video games are leisure, and many are free in terms of money.

I disagree, especially in cases, where it costs you 100k dollars, and leads to years of debt.

If it is free, it is a different story, but not here in US.

In no place university education is “free”. There are different ways it’s funded, but someone pays for it one way or another.

Everyone understands this. People say free, as in "free at the point of use/consumption"

I think it's somewhat disrespectful to assume other people don't understand a pretty elementary economic principle

Maybe, but paying your taxes doesn't put you in debt for decades.

This argument is old and outdated, In the US we pay high taxes similar to places with "free" services.

The US just spends it on foreign governments as opposed to its own citizens like Europe does.

And then lets the services like health care, prison and education be butchered for profit (that doesn't come back to the public good but feeds inequality)

The U.S. doesn’t spend most of its budget on “foreign governments”. The reason public services in the U.S. are so bad despite such high taxes is extreme inefficiency.

If we’re talking about an individual’s ROI ( as the article does ) without taking into account the overall economic benefits, then why isn’t it fair to call something free if an individual doesn’t have to pay for it themselves?

But the cost to the service user is what has bearing on the ROI calculation for those individuals. Different organisational funding systems have different interests.

If you need a huge debt to get it ROI becomes important.

I wouldn't really call university part of education outside of a few specialized vocational degrees.

It's more a life experience, part of growing up (if you have the luxury of being able to afford it) - basically a half-way house between being at home and looked after by your parents, and being out in the job market having to be responsible for yourself.

At a bare minimum it then should also not be about making if for profit